The basic idea of identifying talent is commonplace across many industries, but it becomes especially important in the entertainment industry where agents, managers, producers, directors and other creatives are attempting to find the next great talent to represent or work with.
In talent management, two key areas of focus are (1) performance and (2) potential. Understanding an individual's potential, meaning one's future performance, is an integral aspect of talent management. These foci run across various industries and talent spaces, as for example, actors, authors, directors, models, musicians, producers, writers and the like.
Many talent agents work for a talent agency, which arms them with many departments and recourses to analyze any potential talent in their quest for finding the next greatest thing. Before the digital age, many talent agents spent hours in bars, casting halls, studio halls and wherever else they had a lead about places to find the next greatest talent. Often, these leads would be useless and the agents would be left with nothing to show for all their effort. Other times, the agent may catch a break and find someone worth representing—in other words, a lot of talent scouting may be pure luck. For example, Jennifer Lawrence, the star of some of the biggest grossing box offices such as the Hunger Games, Joy, American Hustle and Silver Lining Playbook, was discovered randomly while on a family vacation at the age of 14 by a talent agent who just happened to see her and thought she would be great for TV.
However, as technology has evolved, the ways through which talent may be found have expanded—most notably, the advent of social media has taken talent discover away from the days of hopping from bar-to-bar performances, to browsing digital performances found at your fingertips without ever having to leave the comforts of your office or home.
Social media is the use of web-based technologies, computers and mobile technology (e.g., smartphones) to create highly interactive platforms through which individuals, communities and companies can share, create, discuss and modify user-generated content or pre-made content already posted online. Social media differs from traditional forms of media such as paper and TV broadcasting in many ways, including larger reach, frequency, usability, immediacy and permanence. Social media involves a large number of users that interact socially with one another and freely express and share opinions among themselves.
It can be argued that social media truly came to age in the early 2000s, with the advent of social networking sites MySpace® and Facebook®. Currently, the most popular social media websites are the content communities such as Instagram, Facebook®, Snapchat® and most notably, YouTube®—interesting enough, theses content communities, where individuals create accounts to share their creative works and thousands flock to see their work, have led to the discovery of many previously undiscovered talent
One of the most famous example of talent discovery from these digital content communities is singer Justin Bieber, who was discovered in 2007 on the then-new video sharing platform, YouTube. When Atlanta based promoter Scooter Braun was searching the site for someone, he stumbled across a video of then 12-year-old Justin Bieber singing a song by Chris Brown. Fast forward ten years and Justin Bieber has won over 144 awards and was named as one of Forbes' most influential celebrities; at the same time, and Scooter Braun has gone on to become a successful manager who continues to use technology to his advantage when scouting and locating talent, even discovering more talent in YouTube®. Ever since the discovery of Justin Bieber on YouTube®, others have followed similar paths to attempt to discovery the next greatest talent, and have had success.
Other famous musicians who have been discovered on YouTube include Carly Rae Jepsen, Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara, Charlie Puth, The Weeknd, Austin Mahone, Pentatonix and Ed Sheeran. Even though YouTube® is credited as being where these individuals were “discovered,” they were all on multiple social media platforms (e.g., Vine®, Facebook®, Twitter®) and appeared in other media outlets (e.g., American Idol®), where anyone could have discovered them. However, without any metrics or specific method for which users track and rank these individuals based on their content put forth on those platforms and media outlets, these individuals went undiscovered until someone noticed them on YouTube® as a result of going “viral.”
Advances in technology not only allow creatives to share their talents, but can also help individuals and companies better locate such talent.
For example, data mining is a technique by which hidden patterns may be found in a group of data. Typically implemented as software or in association with database systems, data mining does not just change the presentation of data but actually discovers previously unknown relationships among the data.
Data mining, however, is a computer intensive and complex tasks. Furthermore, data mining in the social media context requires the mining of very large datasets, which may include millions of records. In such a scenario, it may take hours or even days to build a single model based on such a dataset. Current systems that perform data mining analysis tend to provide inadequate performance for large datasets, and in particular, do not provide scalable performance, as a wide variety of models must be generated to meet specific yet widely different needs.
Currently, there are no tools in existence that utilize these technologies to help automate the process of analyzing talent and determining whether the individual in question can be successful in a respective entertainment field.
As such, a need exists for a system and method to identify quantitative factors in social media postings that can be used to determine the success of a particular individual in the entertainment industry.